


against the tide, we struggle

by TheGuardianAngel



Series: tainted blood [1]
Category: The Walking Dead (Telltale Video Game)
Genre: Autoimmune disease, One Shot, Present Tense, Seizures, Sickfic, Sudden unhealthy weight loss, Type 1 Diabetes, Whump, first part of a series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-24
Updated: 2017-06-24
Packaged: 2018-11-18 11:23:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11289726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGuardianAngel/pseuds/TheGuardianAngel
Summary: Things aren't going well.First was the hunger, then the fatigue and the thirst, and now her bones are poking out and her pants are too large and her face is sunken with illness.





	against the tide, we struggle

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this because I have an odd fascination with diseases and disorders. I'm not diabetic myself, but I know many people who are. I've done large amounts of research on my own for this. Please let me know if I get anything wrong. Diabetes, to me, is a really interesting (in a morbid way) disease. 
> 
> Title is from "In the Water" by Anadel.

The hunger came first. It was rabid, like a caged lion stalking its prey from just a few inches out of its reach. On the days when they didn’t manage to find a meal, it became painful. It was, at the time, the worst physical pain that Clementine had felt in her life.

 When she looks back, Clementine wants to laugh at the way her hunger compared to the thirst that came so soon after. Waking up in the middle of the night with an aching throat and a dry mouth begging for water had long since become normal. All the times that she lapped up the water through cupped hands until she was close to vomiting up water were agonizing, but easy to sit through; the feeling would quickly pass, and her body would beg for more.  
Originally, she and Christa hadn’t been near a stream. There had been one certain time when Clementine thought, almost humorously, that the stream they had moved towards would be gone by the time she was done drinking.

 Granted, Clementine was never done drinking.

 Christa once expressed her frustration in this - once. But Christa’s gone now, and Clementine has become too dehydrated to be able to even shed a single tear. The stream's water dotting her thin cheeks and underneath her sunken, tired eyes will have to play that role instead.

 She can’t be sure if Christa's dead or alive. It's that no one lives long alone out where they are. She’s not stupid. She knows it just doesn't happen that someone magically survives an absolutely, seemingly impossible situation.

 Exhaustion tugs at her body as she makes her way through the trees, every single one of them looking exactly like the others. Her vision blurs momentarily, and even when it clears, there’s no difference. Everything still looks the same - and that's what causes the thumping in her chest. Limbs tingling, she knows that she can't fight off anything that may be hiding there.

 When she meets Sam, he reminds her of herself. His ribs stick out so much that Clementine can count each individual bone - and her ribs are the same way. She hasn’t seen her face in a while, but Christa once said she looked gaunt, and that her cheek bones could be counted, just like every one of Sam's bones.  
His fur looks too big for him; even if it’s short, it looks like it should go on a bigger dog. Her clothes are the same way; she continuously has to pull her pants up and then there's the two shirts that drown her, a subject she doesn't even like to think about. But at least those shirts _keep_ her warm, she thinks. Sam’s hair seems to be falling out in clumps; no warmth in that.

 There’s a small barbecue pit in the middle of the campsite. A few inches away, the lid lies on its back next to the pit, rusted and forgotten. Clementine thinks to herself that Sam isn’t the only forgotten thing here.

 As she kneels down to examine the pit, her hands shake. It's difficult to tell whether or not it's from hunger or if it's from anxiety - maybe it's from the excitement of meeting a real life creature that isn't trying to kill her and/or eat her face off.

 Careful to avoid brushing her hands across the hard, point rust pieces, Clementine simply stares through the bottom of the barbecue pit in the middle of the campsite, wishing it wasn’t in so much disrepair that there’s grass growing through it.

 Another rusting oil drum lies only a few feet away. It’s piled high with garbage. Clementine is more than simply curious – by this point, she’s desperate. The oil drum has cans, specifically empty cans that looked to have contained food. By now, the cold, horrible hunger is back and her mouth feels like cotton.

 A swarm of flies scatters and she wrinkles her nose in disgust. The smell is nearly as bad as a walker, but… not quite.  
And desperate times calls for desperate measures, after all. She’s shoved her hands in walkers before, of course.  She’s held walker entrails in her hands. She’s smeared walker blood on her face, around her eyes and under her knows. This can't be _that_ different.

 Clementine clenches her teeth tightly as she peers in. She knows what she has to do.

 She finds a can of beans; full, unopen, and mildly dented, they’re a godsend. Her hands are trembling now. These headaches have long bothered her but she knows she’ll never get used to them.

 Sam seems friendly. He rubs his furry head against her leg and even though he looks like a fuzzy, yellow bag of bones, there’s still something endearing about him. Briefly, Clementine lets him lick her hand, though she knows inside he’s only hoping she has a bit of food on it.

 That’s why she thought it would be fine to give him beans.

 It’s not long before she meets Luke and Pete. It feels almost like a blur because she spends that long with her vision as hazy as her memory.

 Everything hurts: her arm, her head, her stomach. Luke and Pete don’t understand what she's talking about. They don’t understand why she looks as if she’s been bit by a walker. And they especially don’t understand why she’s so thirsty when she practically begs them for water  and guzzles down the entire canteen that Pete offers her until she feels as if she's about to vomit.

 Her bladder aches. Now her lower abdomen joins her stomach in screaming about the sharp pains that ripple through every inch. Even then, Clementine is still thirsty.

 Moments later, the three of them are walking back to their cabin. She’s up and walking, though her legs feel more like heavy lead than anything else. Clementine carefully removes her hand from covering up the throbbing dog bite on her left hand and rubs at her tear filled right eye, willing herself with all of her might to keep up with Pete and Luke.

 She can’t be a liability to a group, no matter how tired she is. No matter how hungry she is. No matter how thirsty she is. And, frustrating enough, no matter how badly she has to urinate.

 Uncertain seconds pass and Clementine looks down at the ground. It’s beginning to seem more and… what’s the correct word? _Comfortable_? _Soft_? She doesn’t know and her head hurts too much to focus on much more than managing to put one foot in front of the other while staying upright.

 “Clementine, you feelin’ all right?” The voice belongs to Pete. He sounds genuinely concerned. It almost echoes inside of her head.

 “… I’m fine…” Simply saying this takes more effort than she thinks she may be able to give. “I’m just tired.” Rubbing her eyes, Clementine attempts to look more awake than she knows is possible.

 “You’d better be all right,” says Luke, not looking back. “’cause I ain’t carryin’ you anymore with that bite on your arm.” Pete rolls his eyes at the other man's remark.

 Suddenly, Clementine stops. It feels automatic. The blurriness is back. The pounding in her head and her heart rate speed up. Her palms are sweating but her fingertips feel ice cold as the corners of her vision darken, and the darkness is only beginning to spread further and further. She can’t even attempt to focus.

 Her entire body’s numb, and the one thing she wants to do is sleep and never wake up.

* * *

 The next day, the makeshift stitches that she made are even worse than she thought they would be.

 “Her suturing skills need some work,” she recalls Carlos saying the night before. He looked over every inch of her arm; there was a look in his eye that made Clementine unsure on whether something had caught it or if he was looking for something wrong. Maybe he just didn't like the way her sutures turned out. They're fishing wire, after all.  “Otherwise, I’d say she should be fine.”

 When Carlos looks at the wound the next morning, the wire Clementine stitched her wound with feels as if it’s moving around in the holes. He gives her a curious look at first, but quickly becomes stoic. Clementine doesn’t even know if she wants to know what he’s thinking about the wound.

 She saw her face the night before, in the mirror to both the upstairs and the downstairs bathrooms all four times she got up to use the toilet. Her cheek bones have become even more pronounced than she thought they would be. Her eyes are sunken; deep dark circles find their home beneath them. Christa was right; she looks _gaunt_.

 Clementine cringes as she thinks about it, but she remembers how she had heard Rebecca’s voice quietly say to Luke, “She looks… sick.” She pretends not to hear Rebecca when the woman, only half-joking, asks Luke if Clementine is some sort of anorexic, and pretends that it doesn't sting at least a little bit.

 It's no wonder that Luke was so forceful with a bowl of oatmeal last night... no matter how hungry Clementine was at that time, she knows that even if she _hadn_ _’_ _t_ been hungry, he would have made her eat. Rebecca's most likely right about her looking sick, acting like Clementine is almost wasting away.

 Even between all four times she got up for bathroom breaks, her sleep quality wasn’t amazing. The couch is a luxury - she's been sleeping on cold, wet dirt for only God knows how long - but her body is sore beyond belief.

 One of the times she got up, Clementine remembered being thrown around in the river and being pushed around by that bandit. She remembered that the bite from Sam took up most of her thoughts about her own physical wellbeing – so much so that her skinned knees and aching ribs from the night before had taken a backseat.  
She remembers how she pulled her shirt up just enough to expose the skin around her ribs, and watched disgusting purple and red bruising come into view.

There's three bruises; two of them are smaller, with one across her stomach, and the other on the left side of her ribs. The third is the largest and arguably the most painful, taking up space on the right side of her ribs and trailing its way down her stomach.

 Clementine wonders to herself if it’s normal for that kind of thing to keep other people up at night. At this point, she doesn’t know anymore. She doesn’t ask, doesn’t complain, and doesn’t say anything when Pete’s obligatory, _I_ _’_ _m not tryin_ _’_ _to tell you what to do, but maybe you should just go back to sleep and Nick and I can go to check the fish traps by ourselves meets her ears that morning._

* * *

 When Pete is bitten, Clementine wants to cry. But she doesn’t, she holds it all in. Pete’s the one who’s dying here – why should she cry? She wants to smack herself - she has no right to cry.

 In the blink of an eye, they’ve been stranded in an ambulance for what feels like an eternity. Clementine finds an almost empty bottle of water in her bag… She looks at Pete, then at the bottle. There’s a bit of water left in there… The devil on her shoulder whispers in her ear – _it_ _’_ _s just enough to quench your thirst_ _…_ _he_ _’_ _s an adult_ _…_ _he_ _’_ _s dying anyway._

 Clementine wordlessly pushes the water bottle to Pete. She avoids his eyes, but feels them on her as he takes it graciously.

 She’s hungry again. There’s nothing in the ambulance to eat. Pete quenches his hunger with the thoughts of his upcoming death and a cigarette while Clementine hugs her knees tightly to her sore chest. The entire group is counting on the fish that Pete, Nick, and herself had gone to retrieve from the river.

 Only God knows where Nick is right now.

 Pete’s voice is hoarse and nasally. Deep, dark circles collected under his yellowed eyes. His sentence was quickly interrupted by a series of coughs and hacking that jerked his entire body.  
He spits to his left and mutters, “Jesus…” He pauses for a moment before quietly saying, “Stuck in this… _can_ the whole damn day. You wanna hear something funny?”

 Clementine sits up on her skinned knees and notes Pete’s tone. She clenches her teeth and momentarily, thinks of the approaching dawn and the hacksaw that Pete held in his hands over his bitten ankle just hours ago. She has no other choice but to listen. But before she replies, he speaks again.

 “I’ve been thinkin’ – and I don’t wanna die.” A maniacal smirk crosses Pete’s grayed face. He suddenly lets out a laugh that quickly progresses into a coughing fit. “Never thought I’d be the kinda _idiot_ to say somethin’ like that. But there it is.”

 A few seconds passed as his gaze avertes hers.

 “I’m scared, Clementine. Jesus, I’m scared.”

  _Me too_ , Pete, she wants to reply back.

* * *

 The trek away from the cabin feels like the longest trip of her life. All she’s told about Carver at first is that they have to get far away from the man. Carlos’ words come back to her – “I don’t know what he told you, but William Carver is a dangerous man.” The sheer panic on Sarah’s face when she realized who was knocking on their door could have told Clementine that rather quickly.

 Luke says they have to get away from the area. He estimates a week in travel time – maybe longer. They’re in northern North Carolina, he claims, and the safest place to go would probably be somewhere around the Appalachian Mountains, which flow into Virginia.  
Part of Clementine misses Georgia, but the other part of her never wants to see it again.

 Rebecca’s pregnant stomach soon becomes the subject of sneaky glances from everyone in the group, especially Alvin, who worries over his wife as if there’s no tomorrow.

 “I don’t want to be anywhere near Carver.” Sarah says to Clementine when they finally have a moment where they aren’t surrounded by the others. “That was…” Clementine needs no ending to know exactly how Sarah feels, judging by the crestfallen expression on her face.

 Clementine’s thoughts aren’t even on Carver anymore. She wishes the empty water bottle left in the ambulance had more water in it.  
Luke offers her a drink from his canteen, but hastily pulls it from her mouth after she begins guzzling it down the same way did with Pete’s canteen.

 “Sorry – just… don’t drink it all, okay?”

 “Okay.”

 So she sips it slowly instead, and ends up draining it before Luke knows what happens.

 When they stop for a bathroom break, Clementine is more than eager to head off to the side of the forest with Rebecca and Sarah.  
She’s used to urinating outside because it’s practically all she’s done for the last few weeks, but Sarah and Rebecca aren’t. They take longer than her, and while she waits, a small but strange incident catches Clementine’s eye.

 She watches as ants – the big kind that like to live on trees, and not the kind you would find it your three month old, stale bread – gather all around the wet puddle in the dirt.  
Clementine wrinkles her nose in disgust and decides that ants have a disgusting taste in food.

 That night, she eats lukewarm cream of mushroom soup out of a metal bowl, scrapping every inch of the dish clean. Her stomach growls quietly as a cold, hungry feeling fills it.

 The rest of the group discusses other issues; Luke talks about the ground they’ve covered that day, Alvin talks about the walker activity, and Carlos volunteers to look out for the group that night (Luke volunteers as well), while Rebecca chimes in with her own comments every once in a while. Sarah’s off to Carlos’ side, engrossed in _The Hitchhiker_ _’_ _s Guide to the Galaxy_ , while Nick’s gaze is down so far that the bill of his red cap obstructs his eyes.

 He’s chewing his thumbnail, which Clementine notices when he moves his gaze up to her. They lock eyes for a moment, amber staring deep into baby blue.  
Clementine finds herself slowly moving her gaze down towards Nick’s untouched food. He also looks down towards it, then takes a small bite of what she assumes is some sort of stew, and doesn’t look back up.

 In hindsight, it’s probably a good thing Clementine stopped after her one bowl of soup. In the dead of night, she stumbles awake, clutching a blanket around her bony body. Her stomach is in shambles and a watery feeling crosses her thin cheeks.

 Before she knows what’s happening, her throat is burning and she’s automatically ripping the blanket off and flinging herself towards the edge of the camp.

 Clementine can’t even see an inch in front of her but she can taste it – everything comes back up immediately. Her own vomit spills out into the grass in front of her, down her chin, and staining her shirt as she collapses down onto her hands and knees. She gags, unable to stop.

 “Oh – _Clementine_!” The voice is a concerned, hushed whisper. Clementine recognizes Luke almost immediately. She can’t see him, but she feels what she assumes to be his hand on her back, rubbing a soothing circle as the last bit of vomit comes up.

 Stumbling backwards, Clementine bumps into what she thinks is Luke’s knee and collapses against him. She’s trembling; a wave of shame washes over her as she attempts to figure out if she’s sweating, the moisture is vomit, or if she’s wet the bed and the dampness on her shirt and pants is urine. At this point, she’s almost too tired to care… almost.

 It's urine and vomit; she figures this out rather quickly.

 “Luke -” she gasps out, her voice hoarse and hardly audible.

 Clementine can feel Luke move his arm to grab a hold of her. He replies in a low voice, “It’s alright, Clem… are ya okay?”

 She doesn’t answer and tries to speak again. A bitter taste has already filled her mouth as she tries to admit to Luke exactly what happened. “I think I…”  
But she can’t bring herself to. Her face already feels hot enough, heart racing.

 “Yeah,” Luke replies in a voice quieter than before. She's sure he can smell urine and vomit and any other body fluids. He says in a sympathetic sounding tone, “Yeah, you-you _did_ – it’s okay. You got anythin’ else in your bag that you can change into or - ? I-I can get ya a different blanket…”

 For the next few minutes, Clementine can’t do much but barely pull her short sleeved shirt off from over her head after wiping the vomit from her chin. Her stomach seems to flip inside of her as she goes through these motions. She leaves the long sleeved shirt underneath on and stashes away the other shirt in her bag. She doesn't have a second pair of pants or anything to change into; shame washes over her every being.

 Clementine's headache starts up again; everything feels fuzzy and out of focus.

 She hears Carlos and Luke conversing quietly, unable to make out their words, but notices that their tones don’t sound positive in the least. Her head hurts too much to care. She barely makes it back to her previous sleeping spot of a urine-and-sweat-covered blanket before falling back into blackness.

 The next four days are roughly the same. Two more times does Clementine wakes up in the dead of night, vomiting up everything she’d eaten the evening prior. The last day before they reach the mountains, she refuses breakfast, a mid-day meal, and anything after that, no matter how hard her stomach begs for something to fill it up with.

 Her throat feels like brambles. The rest of the group, except for Carlos and Luke, say nothing about her condition other than an urging to eat something small.

 “You’re not feverish, at the very least.” Carlos tells her later. Clementine notes the _at the very_ _least_ and looks down at her bandaged arm, where Sam’s bite was, and nods in agreement. She’s not feverish at all, even if she is sweating a bit. At least they know her condition isn’t from the bite.

 Rebecca offers her stale crackers and Sarah offers her a juice box. Clementine’s stomach growls, but she knows there’s no point anymore. By now, she knows that everything that goes down will come right back up later.

 When Clementine sees the bridge they have to cross, she almost wants water enough to jump off and get it herself. She changes her mind when she watches Matthew’s bloodied body fall to its death just minutes later.

 Her head hurts again, now pounding. There's a feeling in her chest that something is wrong.  
Luke’s yelling at Nick. Nick is yelling at Luke. Carlos snaps at both of them; he tells them to stop arguing and move because walkers are fast approaching.

 “Of course.” Rebecca mutters morbidly, just loud enough for Alvin and Clementine to hear as she looks up towards the rest of the mountain they have to climb.

 There’s a ski lodge at the top of the mountain, which Luke makes fun of because even in the mountains, Virginia doesn’t usually get large amounts of snow.

 “I’ve never even seen snow before.” Clementine replies, reminiscing of the warm winters in Georgia that she misses. A cold gust of wind blows, as if to remind her that she isn't in Georgia anymore and the warm winters where she could run around in a sundress are long gone.

 When they meet Kenny, Clementine feels as if she’s seeing a ghost. Her heart may just jump out of her ribs. When she first sees him, it takes her a minute, but then suddenly she finds herself running towards him, engulfing her old friend around the abdomen.

 The look on his face tells it all.

* * *

 When everyone goes inside of the abandoned ski lodge, Clementine realizes who else is with him. There’s Sarita, whom he introduces as his girlfriend, and a man named Walter, who seems nice enough.

 Something feels off. She can’t quite put her finger on it, but there’s something off. Something in the air; it makes her feel uneasy. Maybe it’s those lights she saw in the woods (what were those? People? Carver? Aliens?). Maybe the hunger and thirst and lack of sleep have finally gotten to her head.

 Just as Kenny beckons for her to follow him, she hears what sounds like soft music. Clementine remembers seeing a radio on the shelf and figures Walter turned it on. But there’s something off about it – it’s not coming from that direction. It’s not coming from anywhere.

 Clementine stops when the vision in front of her changes. Ever so slowly, she watches as the surrounding objects seem to move - rather than her moving from them. Ever so slowly, Kenny asks something. He asks... she doesn't know what he asks. She can hear his yelling, though, as she finds her knees and ribs giving out.

 Her entire head feels fuzzy and suddenly she can’t feel anything at all.

 The next thing Clementine knows, she’s on the couch. Kenny’s hands are on her, pinning her to her side. One hand on the back of her head tells her something’s wrong. Vision blurry, she blinks several times, throat feeling full. She can feel saliva on the pillow that Kenny is pinning her to.

 She can hear voices but she can’t make out what their saying. Carlos asks her something – at least, that’s who she _thinks_ it is, she isn’t sure – and she doesn’t even make out what he says.

 “What?”

 Kenny speaks this time. He asks, “You alright, darlin’?”

 Clementine notices that his hands are off of her. He’s now sitting on the couch next to her, looking from her to Carlos to Sarita, who stands a few feet away, looking apprehensive.

 “What happened?” she tries to ask, but she barely gets the words out. They’re slurred, and dear God everything hurts.

 “Clementine,” Carlos begins, kneeling down to her level. “Have you ever had a seizure before this?”

* * *

 

 When Carver comes for them, it’s one of the few times Clementine genuinely wonders if she’s about to die – well, that’s a bit of a lie. She remembers thinking this on a daily basis for a while. But Carver poses a real threat; it’s one of the times she genuinely wonders if a living, breathing human is about to gun her down with absolutely no remorse.

 He holds her captive for just a moment before Kenny puts his own gun down and surrenders. Even then, Carver’s grip around her body won’t be forgotten anytime soon. Neither will the sight of Walter’s bloodied head after having a bullet put through it.

 She doesn’t know where Luke is, but she knows for a fact that now would be the absolute best time for him to turn up. Or maybe the worst – it’s difficult to tell.

 The trip to Howe’s Hardware Store is even worse than the trek to the ski lodge. Unlike the rest of the group, Carver and his men – and Bonnie, Clementine bitterly reminds herself – won’t let her have anything to drink. They don’t let her relieve herself until she’s been holding it for at least two hours.

 Nick says they stayed in the back of the truck for several hours, but the time blends together for Clementine. She tries to sleep, or least _rest_ , for most of the drive. Her muscles are weak now, her mind barely working at all, it seems.

  _Fucking seizures._

It’s a nightmare, all around.

 And then there's The Pen. It's what they call the garden center at Howe’s. It’s a fitting name – the fencing is full of barbed wire and boards with exposed nails. The door is a locked shutter that none of them can get open from the inside. The beds are shelves with thin blankets and pillows.

 Reggie’s an interesting – and Clementine would use that word loosely – man who seems socially awkward and is missing his arm up to his shoulder.

 When Rebecca introduces him to her, Kenny, and Sarita, Clementine stays silent. The rest of the group would be able to tell she just doesn’t feel good; to put it lightly, she’s still a bit disoriented from what Carlos identified as a grand mal seizure. He says she spent forty-five seconds completely unconscious before she seized, and forty-five _minutes_ unconscious afterwards.

  _Fucking seizures._

 Clementine's  never had one of those before, and just as she’s thinking that she never wants to have one again, Reggie looks straight at her and nods to his arm.

 “This freaks you out. It’s okay, it freaks me out too sometimes.” he says with a playful smirk that seems self-depreciating.

 Clementine wants to say, _Yes. It does freak me out because it reminds me of my friend Lee who got bitten because of me and lost his arm because of me and then died because of me_. But instead, she just stays silent and gives a tiny half-shrug.

 Rebecca looks from Reggie to Clementine and says gently, “Hey, it’s okay. He’s a friend.”

 “Sorry,” Sarita says, also looking down at Clementine. “She’s had a rough few days.”

 If that isn't  the understatement of the century, Clementine vows to eat dirt.

* * *

 The next morning, she watches Sarah get smacked across the face by Carlos. He didn’t want to do it, though Carver said it was either him or Troy who would smack her.

 Clementine watches through tired, sunken in eyes. Deep inside, she wants to cry because she’s the reason Sarah’s getting smacked anyway. It’s her fault for looking tired and ill; Sarah had only spoken out of turn because she was asking if Clementine was okay. She plays around with the bottom of her shirt and feels that she should be the one on the ground, crying from pain.

 A woman named Tavia brings her to a small room, the armory, where she meets up with Bonnie.

 The ginger-haired woman looks sheepish. She looks smaller and much more vulnerable – if that’s even possible – than she did last night. She looks ashamed.

 Clementine says nothing to her because she doesn’t want Bonnie to respond; her head is throbbing again and she’s thirsty and hungry and tired.

 “I guess you’re startin’ your day with me.”

 “Yeah.”

 “We’re loadin’ magazines.”

 Bonnie shows her how to open up the magazines and how she has to meticulously place each individual bullet. They load a combined effort of three before Bonnie speaks again. It’s an apology and Clementine has no idea what to say to it at all.

 They speak in hushed voices about Howe’s, about Carver, and about the missing Luke. Bonnie tells her how she was supposed to leave Howe’s but chickened out, and asks about how the first night in the Pen was.

 “It was cold.” Clementine replies dully, not even bothering to make eye contact. “I was hungry.”

 Truthfully, she's only using this to guilt Bonnie as a petty form of revenge. She's always cold and always hungry, anyway.

 Bonnie looks concerned, mouth opened slightly. Her light blue eyes widen and she asks, “They – they didn’t feed y’all?”

 Clementine shakes her head. Truthfully, she probably would have thrown up anything in her stomach anyway. After her seizure, Kenny mentioned she vomited up stomach acid. Maybe it was a good thing she hadn’t eaten anything the night before.

 “I don’t have nothin’ on me,” replies Bonnie in a guilt laden tone. “I’m sorry.”

 Clementine loses count of how many magazines they fill. Each one is beginning to blend together because she’s too busy focused on forcing her shaking hands to shove bullets inside rather than count. Every few bullets, she loses feeling in her fingers for a few seconds; her hands feel like lead.

 She isn’t sure how long she’s in there for before the radio on the counter next to Bonnie goes off for what feels like the umpteenth time. The voice belongs to Tavia.

 “Hey Bonnie,” she says, sounding inconvenienced. “Is that girl still down there with you? I need to come get her.”

 Bonnie picks up the radio, pushes the button, and responds, “Yeah, she’s here.”

 “Okay, I’ll be right over.”

 It’s a good thing that Bonnie takes the magazine from Clementine’s hands because she feels like she may drop it with how loose her grip feels. Her hands don’t seem to grip and she’s actually starting to feel a bit lightheaded now.

 “Clementine?”

 She looks up to meet Bonnie’s eyes.

 “I said I found somethin’ at the ski lodge. You might like it.”

 The “something” in question is a blue winter coat. It’s big on Clementine, but only because of her low weight. It fits height wise – granted, she’s only about four foot-nine inches tall – and it has a sun and rainbow on the front. Clementine gives Bonnie one of the first genuine smiles she’s been able to give in a long time.

 “What’s with the ugly jacket?” The voice belongs to Tavia.

 Clementine looks up to see her standing in the doorway, an incredulous expression on her face as she stares at the jacket on Clementine’s person.

 “Tavia.” Bonnie scoffs, to which Tavia responds with a roll of her eyes. “I’ll see you later, Clementine.”

 Leaving the armory is the last thing Clementine can remember before she crashes, once again, into darkness.

* * *

 Everything hurts and everything is cold. Every sense is dulled.

 “… She wasn’t listenin’ to me when I was tryin’ to talk to her. It was like she couldn’t even hear me –” The voice displays the same southern drawl that Bonnie holds… Clementine knew it had to be her. “What’d they call those – absence seizures or somethin’?”

 Moving her hand slightly, Clementine realizes that she’s not on the ground. She’s not on the concrete floor by the armory. She’s on a white cot that smells like the type of aerosol cleaner that she remembers her mother, a doctor, using on her own office. It smells like a sterile environment.

 “Yeah, absence or petite mal seizures – I’ve never seen them occur in fast succession like that though,” It’s a different female voice. This one holds an accent that sounds too northern to be from wherever Bonnie is from, but too southern to be a northern United States accent. “It’s more likely she just zoned out." Then, in a sarcastic tone, she says, "That happens to people sometimes.”

 The third voice to speak is Carlos. “Some people can sense when a seizure is about to come on. It’s called an aura.” He sounds both irritated and concerned, somehow, and it sounds almost as if he and the other woman are both trying to get Bonnie to shut up and leave but Clementine can’t really tell. "It's possible she may have been experiencing that." He's silent for a moment. "Or it could be that I have hardly seen her eat or sleep in almost two days."

 Clementine shuts her eyes against the blinding light that she meets when she turns to her side. It’s an oil lamp, and though the flame is small, it’s still a bit too bright for her liking. Clementine doesn’t have to wonder why – she knows why. She knows she had to have had another seizure.

 If her mother had been there, she would have asked her, _What_ _’_ _s wrong with me?_ Her mother had been not only a doctor, but someone she could trust. Thinking about her hurt because her mother _wasn_ _’_ _t_ there. She _couldn_ _’_ _t_ say to her, _Mom, I_ _’_ _ve been feeling so sick and tired for weeks_ _…_ _what_ _’_ _s wrong with me?_

 “If she’s not epileptic, there’s most likely some sort of underlying issue, Bonnie. Non-epileptic people don’t just randomly begin having seizures.” It’s the currently unnamed woman again. “Well, I take that back – there’s some exceptions, okay? Don’t look at me like that – I’m not stupid, I passed nursing school. You don’t just randomly begin having grand mal seizures for no reason." The woman sighs. "We can ask her about any trauma she might've had to the head, or if she can ever _remember_ having anything that could be classed as a seizure. Actually, you say she’s been really sick, right?”

 “She kept waking up and vomiting during the night for the past week. I don’t know past that. She’s only been with us _for_ this past week.”

 “I’d say it sounds like a bug if she hadn’t had the seizures.”

 "Yeah, well, no shit, Vera!” Bonnie exclaims from somewhere Clementine can’t see her. She can’t make out much apart from light in front of her anyway.

 There’s a brief pause between their conversation, silence, and Clementine has an awkward feeling that Carlos and the medic/nurse called Vera have both paused to glare at Bonnie.

 “I should have checked for hypoglycemia or something!” says Vera suddenly, as if reaching a horrible realization. Then, she pauses again and says, “I have that, actually. Had a seizure from it once. I guess I'll add glucose to the list of shit for us to check."

 Carlos says something she can’t make out, and Bonnie responds back. They go back and forth for a moment before Vera, who now seems to be thinking aloud, says, “She doesn't smell... _sweet_ or anything, does she? I only say this 'cause I brought up glucose."

 Clementine thinks to herself that this is about the worst time she’s ever heard someone care about the smell of someone.

 “What are you thinking of?” asks Carlos, suddenly sounding... some kind of concerned. Bonnie doesn’t reply but Clementine guesses that she probably feels the same way. Clementine herself agrees, though she can’t bring herself to verbally chime in.

 Vera clears her throat, and then replies with, “Uhh... ketones?"

 There’s a pause. Clementine strains to listen because she’s never heard of ketones, and she’s actually beginning to become annoyed that they’re talking about her as if she’s not even there.

 “Ketoacidosis."

 “Well, is she diabetic?”

 Clementine’s breath gets caught in her throat when she hears these words. Her heart beats against her chest wildly as she tries to hear.

 “I don’t know. Now that I think about it…” Carlos pauses again for a moment, and there’s a gentle tap on the ground, as if he’s pacing or walking around. But Clementine, with her back to them, can’t tell. “I think she has been showing signs.”

 “But she’s so…” Bonnie begins in a shaky voice, sounding distant, as if she had been leaving when she suddenly heard their words. “… _Little_. I thought ya had to be _big_ to be diabetic..."

 “Well – the stereotypical diabetic is someone with adult-onset, type two. It's a metabolic disorder and involves insulin resistance. They’re usually overweight or obese.” Vera tells her quickly, sounding a bit as if she had swallowed a medical journal on the subject. “Then you got type one; used to be called juvenile diabetes because it's so uncommon in adults. It's an an autoimmune disorder - kinda somethin' like a wasting disease." She hums quietly, sounding as if she's tapping her fingers. "Uh, well... Basically, the beta cells in the pancreas don't work at all, so there’s no insulin being produced. The body can't metabolize food or nutrients at all without insulin, so it basically cannibalizes itself to get energy - and they tend to piss out a lotta calories in the sugar that doesn't get broken down, too. Type ones tend to lose weight _really_ quickly because of that, and uh... - she’s pretty clearly underweight, so…”

 Clementine hears footsteps coming closer to her and pretends to be asleep. She hears Vera and Bonnie conversing; Vera tells Bonnie to go back to the armory. Bonnie replies that she hopes everything goes okay with Clementine. Clementine _wishes_ she was asleep.

 “How much of that have you been listening to?” She warily turns onto her back and looks up at Carlos, who is staying on the other side of the cot. His eyebrow is lifted, and suddenly she feels like she's just been caught spying on something other than a conversation about her wellbeing.

 Clementine can’t bring herself to answer, and looks away.

 Carlos sighs, shoulders sagging, and turns back to Vera. Clementine realizes she remembers this woman – Vera is the blonde woman with the blue vest that she saw lead Carlos away from the group yesterday. She's biting her lip, very hard by the looks of it, and avoiding eye contact with both of them while picking at the hem of her sleeve.

 “Do you have a glucose monitor?”

 “Yeah, one second.”

 She disappears out of view for a moment, and there’s a loud thud, followed by a cry of pain, and a _Jesus! Who the hell put that here?_ then returns, still avoiding eye contact, to them with a thick, black device in one hand and a small tube in the other hand.

 Vera lifts an eyebrow at Carlos, nods to the tube, and then to Clementine as she hands them over. He responds with a similar look. Clementine feels a shiver go up her spine as she stares at the black device, which has some sort of pen-looking object attached to the side.

 “What’s that for?” Clementine asks quietly. Her mouth is dry, voice hoarse.

 Carlos sets the small tube down on the edge of the cot, then pulls the pen off of the side of the black device.

 “I have to prick one of your fingers and test a drop of your blood,” he explains, fiddling with the black device. “It might hurt a bit, but it will only hurt for a second.”

 When he takes a hold of her pointer finger, Clementine doesn’t know what to expect at all. There's no point on the pen, but as Carlos places the pad of her finger (he tells her pad would be better to draw blood from than the side because a dot would form) on the tip, she feel an opening.

 He pushes down on the pen, which clicks, and then pushes down again. The noise is, of course, a click, but it sounds more like a stapler and a sharp, needle like point pushes into her finger – but only for a second. When it retracts, and Carlos pulls the pen away, most of the pain diminishes and the only small amount that’s left is dull.

 Clementine doesn’t look because she can feel blood forming a dot on her finger, and the wave of nausea that washed over her earlier is back, and even just looking at blood might send her over the edge again. She doesn’t want to vomit up any more stomach acid. She’s already dehydrated enough.

 Carlos drags her finger to a small, white strip that stuck out of the bottom of the glucose monitor. The strip seems to pull the dot of blood into the black edge, and then a large hourglass appears on the screen of the monitor.

 It beeps, high and loud, and Clementine can see what it says.

 First, it flashes **833** , then **HI** appears underneath the number. Carlos’ eyes get wide, but overall, he doesn’t look completely surprised.

 They both lock eyes for a moment. Clementine suddenly feels as if an ice cube has slipped into the pit of her stomach. She’s heard of diabetes, and even if she doesn’t know every detail, she can tell that something isn’t right, and judging by the reaction she got from Carlos, it doesn’t seem to be good.

 She feels sick to her stomach as she lays back down on the cot.

 Clementine finds out what the tube is for quite quickly after this when Carlos leaves the side of her cot and Vera comes over with a cup. She picks up the small tube, which Clementine realizes contains tiny, yellow test strips that look similar to the white one that stuck out of the glucose monitor.

 “Hey, honey.” Vera says quietly, “My name’s Vera… I’m a nurse… I _was_ a nurse, anyway. Uh, we’re tryin’ to figure out what’s wrong, but in the meantime, would you take this cup and…?" She doesn’t even need to finish her sentence before Clementine realizes exactly what Vera wants her to do with the cup.

 She shoots Vera a small grimace, then takes the cup, and lugs her fatigued body off of the cot.

 Twenty minutes later, Clementine is on the cot again. She wants to sleep. Her stomach is rolling again, and her arm lies on top of her sternum with two needles in her veins. Just a few inches away are two intravenous bags. One is completely filled with what she assumes is water; the other just barely has liquid in it.

 Insulin. The liquid that smells like dirty socks and saline, at least to Clementine.

 “Did you test the urine sample?”

 “Yeah. Uh… from what I can tell, there’s no sign of ketones, which is good." Vera pauses, and nods her head. “Yeah – no sign of D-K-A, which is a first in my career, honestly - that's quite an achievement." She looks over to Clementine, who just barely moves her head to look back. “Any complications Clementine’s experiencing – that’s strictly because of hyperglycemia.”

 Carlos sighs, and he also looks over to Clementine, who meets his eye with her half-lidded ones.

 “We don’t have the technology to test for it, but I would assume that it’s type one.” he says to Vera, lowering his voice.

 Clementine knows that she shouldn’t be surprised. She heard Vera mention it earlier. And if Vera and Carlos were to be believe, then it was no surprise she had been feeling so sickly. Vera said before… her own body was breaking down its tissue to keep her alive. Of course. It made sense.

 And the insulin is supposed to keep her alive now, but Vera mentioned she would have to test Clementine’s blood glucose levels every hour until it's at a different level.

 Vera doesn’t know that Clementine heard her say they only had a small amount of insulin left.

 Vera doesn’t know that Clementine heard her say she would die without it.

 She pushes her head into the cot as Carlos and Vera go into another area of the medical bay and she thinks of the rest of her group. She thinks of Luke, whom they haven’t seen in a day and a half. She thinks of Sarah, who must be scared out of her mind right now.

 She thinks of Rebecca, who probably is also terrified. They’re stuck with Carver for… who knew how long. Alvin was gone – where had that man gone? Carver’s office? She doesn’t know. Maybe Kenny and Sarita will worry about where she was. Maybe Nick will too.

 She feels helpless. Of all of the things to die from after this long, it'll be an autoimmune disease that she’s only ever heard of referred to in her own mother’s medical texts. She’s going to die, Clementine thinks, and everything Lee did for her is going to be wasted in vain. Everything would be.

 When Carlos comes back over to her, she asks him if she’s going to die. He doesn’t answer that question.

 Clementine can feel tears welling up in her eyes as she looks at her forearm and stares at the two separate sets of intravenous needles in her veins. Part of her wants to rip them out and throw them on the ground and stomp on them. Part of her doesn’t want to die.

 She doesn’t want to die.

 She _can_ _’_ _t_ die. Everything would have been _wasted_. Dying like this is stupid. Dying like this… it isn’t an option, she tells herself. Deep inside, she just wants to curl up into a ball and cry, but she doesn’t want to do that when Carlos is in the room because that would make things even more awkward. It doesn’t feel fair at all.

 It doesn’t feel fair because she isn’t _ready_ to die. 


End file.
